Three-month-old Maria Clara and Maria Eduarda Oliveira Santana are conjoined twins from Salvador, Brazil. They are currently awaiting surgical separation in Goiânia, Brazil and living at the Casa do Interior de Goiás -- a center that provides lodging and food to patients and their families.

Earlier this month, family photographer Mateus André had the opportunity to photograph the twins and speak to their parents, 20-year-old Denise Borges Oliveira and Caique Santana Ramos dos Santos. André told The Huffington Post that the family is "very poor" and "going through a lot of problems."

"I met them by chance, when my wife and I were spending some days in Goiânia," he said. "We were walking in the city, and I saw a story on TV asking for donations." Wanting to help the family, he visited the couple with their daughters at the center. 

"The girls’ condition is not easy, the place is poor, and they need and will need many donations," André said, explaining that the parents have to take turns sleeping so that they can care for the twins. But, he added, "in spite of all difficulties they face, the family can be hopeful with the awaited surgery, and they really believe in a better future."

Because the girls share a liver, the surgery is risky, but the medical staff is optimistic. The photographer said he still keeps in touch with the parents and the girls' progress via WhatsApp.

André said he wants to use photography to bring attention to children and babies with physical and intellectual disabilities. "I have a very big responsibility to show other sides of childhood, because reality is full of faces, and the ones that need more attention are those people who are treated by society as insignificant people," he told HuffPost. "Photography has the power to break such concepts and truly draw attention to something valuable, since these people are not alone in the world."

Keep scrolling to see André's stunning photographs.

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You probably know Jon Bon Jovi as the larger-than-life rock star whose vocals have filled stadiums. But we betcha didn't know he's actually pretty darn good at Chinese, too. 

(Or at least singing in Chinese).

Yes, the 53-year-old artist sang Teresa Teng's popular ballad, "Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin," or "The Moon Represents My Heart." The singer, who recorded the song for Chinese Valentine's Day -- which took place last week -- manages to sing it beautifully in Mandarin, while somehow maintaining his very recognizable Bon Jovi flair. 

Listen to the artist get in touch with his softer side and sing an emotional rendition of the song. Then, notice that your jaw has probably dropped to the floor because you were unaware he was capable of singing in Chinese. 

Seriously, what can't he do? 

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Bananas are very good sources of vitamin B, vitamin C and dietary fiber. For some, they're also good for artistic inspiration. 

This is the work of Stephan Brusche, fruit doodler extraordinaire. With remarkable precision, Brusche transforms leather berries -- that's an insider term for banana -- into unusual canvases, carving art history's greatest hits into the deconstructed fruits. 

As you can see, the results are really, really detailed. Like, it's hard to believe that someone took the time to carve a near exact replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" into a nanner. 

So next time you have a browning banana on your hands and aren't in the mood for banana bread, consider this alternative: art. Just be sure to clear your schedule; these look like they take a while. 

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Most casual art fans are familiar with Katsushika Hokusai's iconic work, "The Great Wave at Kanagawa."

Part of a series of 36 views of Mount Fuji completed between 1831 and 1833, the polychrome ink on paper creation features a tower of waves violently collapsing onto a few small boats. The famous mountain appears like a tiny pyramid in the background, punctuated by the intricate lines of sea foam that somehow seem both tranquil and unrelenting.

Except, of course, the waves in Hokusai's famous artwork aren't actually moving, and those boats aren't actually fading into the seascape. Or are they?

Thanks to a Twitter user by the name of Segawa Thirty-Seven, or @s07741657, we can now imagine "The Great Wave" in all its dynamic glory.

Through a collection of altered GIFs, the artist is bringing traditional Japanese art -- specifically, Hokusai's ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the 19th century -- into the new millennium. With the help of a little animated magic, his views of Mount Fuji become surreal moving images, made all the more bizarre by the addition of a few spaceships, high-speed trains and lasers.

Need more proof that there's nothing quite like an art historical meme to make you appreciate the beauty of traditional art? Behold:

H/T Designboom

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When Paulina first notices Fran, she’s drawn to her blonde ringlets, quiet jokes and inventive outfits. These traits may sound like a shallow basis for friendship, but Paulina has a knack for granting purely aesthetic details an air of drama and importance. She is, after all, entering her senior year at a prestigious art school.

Along with the rest of their classmates, Paulina and Fran pay little mind to what they’ll do post-college, instead quibbling over guys, lazily drifting in and out of focus on artworks made in their respective mediums, and, most importantly, dancing. Fran’s an uninspired painter, Paulina a self-important temptress with an intense disdain for making art -- upon realizing this, she convinces the school to create an Art History major on her behalf. They forge a bond on a class trip to Norway, criticizing their classmates, meandering from discothèque to discothèque, buzzed from the high of youth and carefree travel. But the haze clears when Fran gets romantically involved with Paulina’s filmmaker ex, and the pair spends their final year of college begrudgingly admiring each other from afar. 

After graduating, they float on to careers in new cities -- Fran bouncing around odd jobs and landing in a test question-writing position, Paulina stumbling into luck with a curly hair product she invents -- but their time together remains a steady source of nostalgia and yearning. Glaser manages to capture the natural ebbs and flows of friendship, a murkier relationship to explain than romance, and one inexplicably explored less often in fiction. Female friendship in particular seems to have been deemed unworthy of literary merit, but Glaser is among those working wonderfully against that notion.

Her characters live in a world where the most damning insult you can utter is one involving bad hair. But, the emotions underlying their harsh quips are tender. Glaser doesn’t reveal these deeper motivations often, perfectly imitating the callous irony of youth. When she does break from the constant crescendo of confidently declarative sentences to bask in something quiet like a memory or a longing, she reminds the reader of the humanity shaping her self-consciously cool characters. 

It’s the sort of insight that can be afforded by the interior nature of a novel -- imagine if, while watching “Girls” or “Broad City,” the hilarious slacker girl jokes were interrupted by occasional insights into what Hannah or Ilana earnestly feels about her friends. It’d be a jarring disruption from the mood of the shows, but a welcome reminder that unbridled emotions are worth expressing, at least to oneself.

Of course, Fran and Paulina, trying as they are to construct manic pixie personalities, find such unbridled expressions embarrassing. So, they dance around genuine connection like superzealous partygoers, thumping to the beat of a new kind of fate unrealized. Glaser’s novel is charmingly devoid of tech-related missed connections -- what keeps her characters apart are their own pride-fueled insecurities.

The bottom line:

A funny, fast-paced story that follows the post-college life of a drifting, obsessive friendship, Paulina & Fran will appeal to everyone from fans of “Broad City” to Elena Ferrante devotees. 

Who wrote it?

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the short story collection Pee on Water and the poetry collection MOODS. She got her MFA from UMass-Amherst, and her BFA from RISD.

Who will read it?

Those interested in female friendship, comedic writing and the weird intricacies of the art world.

Opening lines:

"Paulina was dissatisfied with her lover. He was too tall. He leaned on things. He thought he knew everything. Lying next to his sleeping body, Paulina considered his narrow, serious nose."

 Notable passage:

"A week later, they all graduated in faux silk, then, like trash in the water, floated off to lousy jobs in obscure towns and heartless cities. Terrible things happened in the news. People killed one another in inventive ways, and Fran read about it guiltily, as if her interest promoted it."

Paulina and Fran

by Rachel B. Glaser

Harper Perennial, $14.99

Publishes September 1, 2015

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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On Aug. 22, 2012, an elderly Spanish woman took it upon herself to give Jesus Christ a makeover.

Specifically, she attempted to restore Elías García Martínez's 1930 painted fresco "Ecce Homo," which hangs in a church in Borja, Spain. The 80-year-old vigilante restorer, named Cecilia Giménez, noticed that J.C. and his crown of thorns had cracked and crumbled into fresco devastation over the years and took it upon herself to touch up the image. No big deal.

Except that touching up frescoes is no simple task. A couple wrong brush strokes and suddenly the Good Shepherd bore a striking resemblance to an electrified spider monkey rocking Bob Ross' hairdo. And just like that, the art world's favorite accidental miracle/act of goodhearted vandalism/meme was born. He was dubbed Beast Jesus. 

News of the hilarious blunder spread quickly around the internet, and the love for Beast Jesus lured curious tourists to the small Spanish town, eventually resurrecting the floundering local economy. In the first year following the restoration, Borja drew 100,000 visitors and the church accepted 150,000 euros in donations.

Three years later, it looks like the art crowd still hasn't gotten over the joke. An opera called "Behold the Man" -- the English translation of "Ecce Homo" -- is now in the works, the brainchild of composer Paul Fowler and librettist Andrew Flack. 

Fowler and Flack have been working on their unconventional comic opera for three years now, weaving into the fold not only the events of that fateful night in 2012 but the viral commotion that followed, leading to an economic revival that lovers of Borja often refer to as a modern-day miracle. 

Both Flack and Fowler had long been hunting for a subject of a potential comic opera. When they heard of Cecilia's painted mishap and its unexpected repercussions, they knew they'd found that they were looking for. "For me, it’s a story of faith," FIack explained to The New York Times. "It’s a miracle how it has boosted tourism. Why are people coming to see it if it’s such a terrible work of art? It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, driven by the media into a phenomenon. God works in mysterious ways. Your disaster could be my miracle."

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"Folks can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that African artists have now taken and secured their seat at the dinner table, invited or not!"

Art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu's provocative quote is featured proudly in the catalog for "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," a group show that recently closed at Richard Taittinger Gallery in New York City. The exhibition, curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, celebrated 12 contemporary artists from Africa who have carved out success in the often too-exclusive world of mainstream art.

The show's title takes a cue from Sidney Poitier’s 1967 dramedy of the same name, and nods to not only the growing impact of contemporary African art on the American creative epicenter of New York, but also the kinds of identity politics that affect the ways we view and interact with the global art world.

"Of crucial importance to the exhibition is an earnest desire to question received or fixed assumptions of 'Africanness' as either a cultural signifier or aesthetic primer in the work of contemporary African artists," the exhibition's description reads. "Etched in their individual works are the intimate contexts that motivate their creative preoccupations, as well as the internationalism of their individual practices. Such contexts bear the markers of what is increasingly being referred to as global contemporary."

From Algerian artist Halida Boughriet's portraits of people living on the margins of society, to Ethiopian artist Aida Muluneh's surreal photography, to Madagascar-born Amalia Ramanakarihina's Rorschach-like ink prints, "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" spans both geography and media. Some of the participating painters and photographers were born in countries throughout Africa, others are of African descent or spent chunks of their childhood on the continent. As the show is quick to point out, the real unifying characteristic that threads the work together is a penchant for using local experiences and histories as a lens through which we can view global issues. 

"Their individual works address Africa, but as a vehicle with which they contemplate our changing times," Nzewi writes in the catalog. "The fifty-two works on view demonstrate the intimate contexts that inspire the artists and the sense of internationalism that attend contemporary artistic practice."

While the show is no longer on view, "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" functions as an intriguing primer on praiseworthy contemporary artists who call places like the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya home. Behold, 12 contemporary African artists you should know -- let their art speak for themselves:

1. Ephrem Solomon (b, 1983, Ethiopia) 

2. Aida Muluneh (b. 1974, Ethiopia)

3. Halida Boughriet (b. 1980, France, of Algerian descent)

4. Amalia Ramanakarihina (b. 1963, Madagascar)

5. Onyeka Ibe (b. 1971, Nigeria)

6. Chike Obeagu (b. 1975, Nigeria)

7. Gopal Dagnogo (b. 1973, Ivory Coast)

8. Uche Uzorka (b. 1974, Nigeria)

9. Beatrice Wanjiku (b. 1978, Kenya)

10. Amina Menia (b. 1976, Algeria)

11. Chika Modum (b. 1980, Nigeria)

12. Sam Hopkins (b. 1979, Italy, grew up in Kenya)

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“Paris is known for its typography,” Louise Fili told The Huffington Post via email. “One needs only to look at the Metro -- the signage is iconic.” The award-winning graphic designer has encapsulated her passion for Parisian signs in a book,Graphique de la Rue: The Signs of Paris.

 "A city lives because of its design elements," she added. "Signs are key to that life."

In Paris, the design elements will likely strike you as familiar, even if you don't have the professional expertise Fili brings to her documentation. Gilded, hand-painted signs; mosaics; art deco; neon scripts and more bring the flavor of the city to the page, each category introduced with a brief explanation and history in Fili's new compilation.

“This book is my typographic love letter to Paris,” Fili writes in the introduction to the thick volume. It’s also something of a eulogy.

Returning to Paris after publishing a book of Italian signs, she expected to find Parisian signage mostly untouched. “Not so, I realized, to my great disillusionment,” she writes. “Gone were many of my favorite neon scripts [...] to be replaced by lackluster, formulaic typography.”

This is no small loss. “When traditional signs disappear, the city becomes homogenized and less picturesque,” she told HuffPost. “A piece of history is gone forever.”

That's not to say that all signs should be in the old Parisian style. "In a modern city, modern signs are appropriate," she explained. "The NYC subway should not be French Art Nouveau. Massimo Vignelli's signage suggests sophistication and modernity. But Paris is a city where historical type and letters are its character."

See more stunning signs from Graphique de la Rue, and check out the book here.

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When Oahu, Hawaii-based photographer Diana Kim saw her father for the first time in years, he was standing on a street corner, staring at the asphalt below.

He didn't acknowledge her presence.

Kim's father was struggling with mental illness, had been homeless for some time and didn't recognize her. Try as she might, she could not get his attention.

"I could tell it was him by his posture and of course, his face," she told The Huffington Post. "He had a distinct way of standing and walking" -- a gait that family members had told her was similar to her own.

A woman approached Kim and told her that her attempts to get his attention were futile, that he'd been standing there for days.

"I wanted to scream at her for not caring, for being so cruel, and not considering that he was my father," Kim told NBC Asian America. "I turned towards her and said, 'I have to try.'"

Instead of giving up, Kim started documenting her father's life with her photography, making every attempt to chip away at his resistance to her help.

Kim, 30, has been photographing Hawaii's homeless people since 2003 -- since before her father was homeless and before she even knew he struggled with mental illness.

She writes on her blog, The Homeless Paradise, that she wants to document the lives and struggles of one of the largest homeless populations per capita in the country because, "When I see the 'homeless,' I see my past in them. I feel their pain and their frustration, their simple joys and hope. I feel their heart. And they feel mine."

Kim's parents separated when she was young and her father was absent for most of her life. Her living environment was unstable, and at times, she lived with relatives, crashed at friends' houses and even found temporary shelter in cars and parks. She hadn't spoken to her father in years when her late grandmother reached out to tell her that he struggled with severe mental illness and had become homeless.

"I think my grandmother reached out to me because she wasn't able to get through to him," Kim told HuffPost in an email. "I can only imagine the kind of pain and desperation she felt in trying to help her son ... I'm sure she was hoping that I could get through to him."

In 2012, she gathered "tidbits of my father’s health status and living arrangements" and went looking for him on the streets of Honolulu. 

After finding him, she blogged in 2014, it became even more clear to her that homelessness is "not just an issue— my father isn’t an issue. He is a person. He is a human being."

Kim told Hawaii Public Radio last year that even though her father was absent while she was growing up, she still felt drawn to help him.

"I was coming from the outside view because I just didn't know who this person was," she said. "I'm in a position where I've spent a lot of time with the homeless, long before my dad landed on the streets. This is my opportunity to try to be his advocate and to try to go ahead and help this man who is my dad." 

For two years, Kim struggled without success to get her father to accept help. The first six months, she has said, "were incredibly difficult."

"He has a severe mental illness," she told Hawaii Public Radio, "and so to expect that he’s gonna be capable to voluntarily, to willingly and to consent the whole way through -- that’s not reasonable." 

On her blog, Kim says she often went searching for him at odd hours of the night only to experience "the stab of sorrow and despair as I watched him walk away from me, and the weight of my tears as I drove away not knowing when I would see him again." 

It was only when he had a heart attack and Kim was called to the hospital that her father finally began treatment for his mental illness.

"A year and a half, two years ago, my dad wasn't even there. His spirit was not there," Kim told NBC. "Today, you look at him and he has life in his eyes."

Now, Kim is helping her father take small, but monumental steps toward regaining his life. When he recently mentioned his desire to become a taxi driver again, she helped him get an appointment for a road test and a new driver's license.

When he passed, "He was beaming, a full ear-to-ear grin," she wrote in her blog. 

But Kim knows "the road to recovery is ongoing," and says she and her father, who is now living in an assisted living facility, are taking things day by day as they relearn how to have a relationship with one another.

"I do my best to not place any unrealistic expectations on my father or our relationship," she told HuffPost.

“Even though he’s doing better, I still see that there are days when he does struggle with maintaining his treatment plan," she told Hawaii Public Radio last week. "And because now he’s becoming more independent, he has that ability to choose"

"I keep my fingers crossed," she has written, "that my dad will stay in a 'good place.'" 

In between helping to care for her father, pursuing a law degree at the University of Hawaii, and being a wife and a mother to two young boys, Kim still finds time to reach out to the homeless community and brings books to children in the Kakaako homeless encampment, one of the city's largest. 

She is working on a photo book, which she successfully Kickstarted in January, to chronicle her journey with her father, as well as the lives of other homeless people in Hawaii. She plans to use her Kickstarter funding to distribute USB bracelets to Honolulu's homeless, so they can have wearable, digital copies of their important documents.

Regarding the big policy issues surrounding homelessness, Kim wrote that, "I oddly accept that the homeless condition will never completely go away. ... But no matter what the circumstances are, the most important thing to remember is that they are people. And people deserve to be treated with respect even if they’ve hurt you."

"I focus on the person behind the circumstance," she told HuffPost. "So long as we are alive, we have that 'second chance'"

Watch more on Kim and her father's story below:

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Red hair is usually the result of a mutation in a gene called MC1R, also known as a melanocortin 1 receptor. Normally, when activated by a certain hormone, MC1R sparks a series of signals that leads to the production of brown or black pigment. Yet, in cases when both parents are carriers of the recessive MC1R gene and said receptor is mutated or antagonized, it fails to turn hair darker, resulting instead in a beautifully fiery buildup of red pigment. 

As previously estimated by BBC News, between one and two percent of the world's population -- or 70 to 140 million people -- are redheads. In Scotland and Ireland, around 35 percent of the population carry the recessive gene that yields crimson locks, and the redhead count is around 10 percent. As such, the word ginger often calls to mind visions of Celtic-Germanic attributes -- namely, pale, white skin. 

White skin and red hair may constitute the stereotypical image of a redhead, but it's by no means a comprehensive one. French-born, London-based photographer Michelle Marshall is documenting the stunningly diverse manifestations of the MC1R gene, particularly in people of color. 

"I am currently interested in documenting the incidents of the MC1R gene variant responsible for red hair and freckles, particularly amongst black and mixed raced individuals of all ages," Marshall wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

"I want to stir the perception that most of us have of a ‘ginger' as a white caucasian individual, potentially of Celtic descent ... As we struggle with issues of immigration, discrimination and racial prejudice, Mother Nature, meanwhile, follows its own course, embracing society’s plurality and, in the process, shaking up our perceptions about origins, ethnicity and identity."

Marshall originally devised the project, which she referred to as a "visual census," to document different manifestations of freckles. Eventually, she refined the project, embarking on a mission to document as many Afro-Caribbean redheads as possible. All of Marshall's subjects thus far have been complete strangers who she has discovered through social media, word of mouth or running into each other on the streets. 

 The close-up portraits document every freckle and stray hair, with every image, expanding the dominant, narrow understanding of what redheads can and should look like.

The photographs and their subjects are undeniably stunning. However, the enchanting appeal of the images has its drawbacks. "A beautiful picture doesn't always relate what it's like to be different," Marshall said in an interview with Vice. "There's a flipside to being different: it's not always accepted. Beautiful photography serves one purpose, but in the context of daily life people may not have that reaction."

Model Natasha Culzac, who covered Marshall's project in Vice and posed for the photograph above, shared her personal experience growing up with red hair and dark skin.

"For me, growing up tall, mixed-raced, with thick, frizzy ginger hair, in a predominantly white, working-class seaside town was not the ticket. At 13 years old I was buying skin whitening cream from Boots to pulverize the freckles and at 14, during my Slipknot phase at the turn of the millennium, was violently straightening my newly-dyed black hair. Now, though, I couldn't care less and relish being unique."

Categorizations fall short. Stereotypes disappoint. Difference is beautiful. There is a lot to learn from Marshall's striking portraits, if we could only stop staring at them.  

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Another day, another museum fail. 

According to several reports, a 12-year-old gallery-goer in Taiwan was going about his business this week when he tripped in front of a million-dollar painting and used said million-dollar painting to break his fall. Cue so many shaking heads.

Yes, the young patron of the arts was caught on CCTV casually perusing a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at Huashan Creative Park in Taipei when he stumbled, braced himself against some expensive art, and subsequently punched a hole in a 17th century Paolo Porpora oil painting titled "Flowers." The footage shows that he was drinking a can of soda, before the soda became briefly lodged in "Flowers."

Some outlets initially reported that the rare 350-year-old piece, belonging to a private collector, would be shipped to Italy for restoration this week.

However, an Information Center representative at Huashan Creative Park told The Huffington Post over the phone on Tuesday that the painting has already been repaired. "We asked someone to help us who is handling the painting all the time," Julia Liao, another representative who sells tickets for the exposition, reiterated. "It’s OK today."

She confirmed that the painting is back on display for now.

The 12-year-old's family will not be held financially responsible for the damage to the painting, thanks to good ol' insurance. But the kid with the can has become somewhat of an accidental YouTube star, and we're not sure State Farm covers that.

At the end of the day, the nameless art lover will probably fare better than that child who used a Donald Judd sculpture as his playground. Or how about that woman who peed on a Clyfford Still painting? 

If you need a refresher course on museum etiquette, check our handy guide to not being the worst person in a gallery. Until then, we've said it before and we'll say it again: this is why we can't have nice things.

Additional reporting by Suzy Strutner.

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MOSCOW, Aug 25 (Reuters) - A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov to 20 years in a high-security penal colony for "terrorist attacks" in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in April 2014, RIA news agency said.

The Crimea-born Sentsov pleaded not guilty and denounced the trial as politically driven, amid high tensions between Russia and the West over Moscow's role in the crisis in Ukraine.

The military court in Russia's south-western city of Rostov on Don sentenced the second defendant in the case, Alexander Kolchenko, to 10 years in prison. State prosecutors have asked for jail sentences of 23 years for Sentsov and 12 for Kolchenko.

TV footage showed the two men locked in a courtroom cage, laughing in derision when sentencing was pronounced. They put their arms round each other's shoulder in solidarity and broke into an impromptu rendering of the Ukrainian national anthem.

"In the words of Oleg Sentsov - a trial by the occupier cannot be just by very definition," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on his Facebook site "Be strong, Oleg! There will come a time when those who organized this so-called trial will themselves sit on the bench of the accused."

 Amnesty International has denounced the trial.

"The men have been subjected to an unfair trial on 'terrorism' charges relating to their opposition to Russia's occupation of Crimea," the rights group said.

"The military trial was rife with irregularities, including shocking revelations about the use of torture and other ill-treatment to extract testimony."

Russian state prosecutors charged Sentsov with organizing a "terrorist group" in Crimea to wrestle the peninsula away from Russia after the annexation. Russian investigators say the two set on fire two offices in Crimea between April and May 2014, including one of Russia's ruling party, United Russia, RIA said.

Russia annexed Crimea after protests in Kiev toppled Ukraine's Moscow-allied president, Viktor Yanukovich. Unrest then spilled into east Ukraine, where fighting between Kiev forces and Russia-backed rebels has killed more than 6,500 people to date.

The West imposed sanctions on Russia over Crimea and has stepped them up since then, accusing Moscow of driving the rebellion in east Ukraine. Moscow sides with the rebels but denies sending serving Russian troops or arms to the separatist militias. (Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska and Richard Balmforth, editing by Larry King)

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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — As Polish river levels fall to record lows amid a prolonged drought, the material remains of Poland's tortured 20th-century history are coming to light on newly exposed riverbeds, with Jewish tombstones and the human remains of Soviet fighter pilots and their plane being found in recent days.

Those discoveries follow that of stone fragments from the early 20th-century Poniatowski Bridge across the Vistula River in Warsaw which the Germans blew up in 1944 as they crushed the Warsaw Uprising.

"The Vistula River is hiding no end of secrets. They are everywhere," said Jonny Daniels, the head of Jewish foundation "From the Depths," who waded into a shallow area of the Vistula on Tuesday, picking up fragments of stones with Hebrew lettering.

For the most part, officials knew that archaeological remnants remained hidden under wild and murky waters of the Vistula River or its tributaries. But it was simply impossible to carry out searches for them until now. Amid a prolonged drought, the Vistula, which flows 1,047 kilometers (651 miles) from the Beskidy Mountains to the Baltic Sea, is at its lowest level since measurements started in the late 18th century — leading explorers and fortune-hunters to comb riverbanks across the country.

On Sunday, explorers found the remnant of the Soviet fighter-bomber plane in the Bzura River, a tributary of the Vistula, near the village of Kamion in central Poland. The pieces have been moved to a museum in nearby Wyszogrod for examination, with more recovery work planned for Saturday.

 The head of the museum, Zdzislaw Leszczynski, told The Associated Press that parts of Soviet uniforms, a parachute, a sheepskin coat collar, parts of boots, a pilot's personal TT pistol and radio equipment were found, along with a lot of heavy ammunition. The inscriptions on the control panel and on the radio equipment are in Cyrillic.

The uncovered remnants are part of the larger story of a devastating war that played out across Poland from 1939-1945: a German invasion from the west, a Soviet invasion from the east, the murder of Jews across occupied Poland and fighting between the Soviets and Germans after Adolf Hitler turned on former ally Josef Stalin.

 Leszczynski said that witnesses had described the plane being hit while flying low in January 1945 and crashing down through the thick ice and into the river. At that time in the area, the German army was retreating toward Berlin before the Red Army's advance.

"Until now, the water level did not allow for the search and there was no one willing to enter this swamp," he said.

Russian Embassy spokeswoman Valeria Perzhinskaya said she considers the discovery important and believes the crew could be identified by the numbers on the wreckage and could be properly buried. About 600,000 Soviet troops were killed fighting the German army on Polish territory.

The Jewish tombstones that were found in Warsaw are believed to come from the Brodno cemetery in Warsaw's Praga district. Once the resting place of 300,000 Jews, only 3,000 tombstones remain there today; the rest were removed during and after the war and used as building materials and to reinforce the river's banks.

Two weeks ago, a man walking along the river in Warsaw came across fragments of the tombstones with Hebrew lettering and took Daniels there on Tuesday. In the meantime, some had already been removed, though a few fragments were still lying on the riverbed. Now Daniels hopes to take students there to do a more thorough search and return anything he can find to the cemetery.

"Jewish history is buried in the Vistula," he said.

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Giving birth is a beautiful miracle of life and a thing on TV that is usually just lots of screaming. And more screaming. And, unfortunately, being too late for an epidural.

But does all that drama affect what women think producing a small human out of their vagina will actually be like? As it turns out: more than you'd think!

A study by Danielle Bessett of the University of Cinncinati's sociology department found that fictional pregnancies impact ideas about real-life pregnancies, even for highly-educated women who consider themselves immune to such trivialities as Monica Potter saying, "Oh, God," over and over on NBC's "Parenthood."

Bessett found that TV's representations can have an impact on "unacknowledged 'pregnancy mythologies.'" (That's some Roland Barthes for critical theoreticians and "stuff you know and don't even realize you know" for everyone else.)

There's a wide array of coverage of the inaccuracies at play in depictions of pregnancy on TV. As Bessett wrote, summarizing a series of papers by TV scholars, shows tend to "over-represent high-risk pregnancies in comparison to low-risk ones [and] normalize biomedical interventions." Basically, it's all mostly wrong, because drama.

What Bessett wanted to find out, though, was what kind of effect that had on women preparing to give birth.

Bessett conducted a series of longitudinal interviews with sample of 64 pregnant women. Among the small, qualitative sample, she found that even those who disavowed TV as a source of information for the birthing process later referred to fictional scenes when describing their expectations. The disadvantaged women within the study were more likely to consult reality TV in their "information gathering" efforts, but were also affected by the screaming, excessive water-breaking and screaming of prime time.

Overall, Bessett argues her results suggest that women "underestimate or underreport" the true impact of pop culture on their ideas about pregnancy.

Her findings contain an important nugget of truth for health professionals trying to negotiate the media's interference on their patients' understanding of pregnancy. Her research is yet more evidence that fictional representation matters, that TV depictions translate to cultural understanding and that watching Rachel give birth on "Friends" has a real-life impact, regardless of whether or not you think the whole "will they/won't they" thing with Ross was gratuitous by the end of the series.

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Parents of twins often describe life with their little ones as double trouble, double fun, and double love.

We asked the HuffPost Parents Facebook community for photos of their twins and received thousands of adorable, hilarious and love-filled responses. 

In one particularly heartwarming submission, mom Nicole Knight shared a sweet photo of her twins in the hospital at 5 months old. Baby Peyton was "gravely ill with meningitis/sepsis," she wrote, adding, "We decided to let her twin brother Jedd see her and hold her hand."

"You'd never know she was fighting for her life by the smile he put on her face," the mom continued. "If that's not twin love I don't know what is!"

Keep scrolling for 45 more delicious duos who show what twin love is all about.

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The residents of the “Jungle” -- the makeshift camp of refugees in Calais, France -- may be living amid squalor, but they are dreaming of poetry.  

Volunteers recently set up a library in the camp, which they named "Jungle Books." It has around 200 titles so far, including children’s books, fiction and dictionaries, according to The Guardian.

“I wanted to start something that offered real, practical help,” Mary Jones, a British teacher who helped start the library, told Publishing Perspectives. “Many people here are well-educated -- they want to get on and they want books that will help them read and write English, apply for jobs, fill-in forms.”

The Jungle, on the northern shore of France, is home to around 3,000 refugees who have fled repression and war in countries including Eritrea, Afghanistan and Syria. Many want to reach the U.K. because of family connections, the shared language, or simply hope for a better life.

The camp made headlines in recent weeks after hundreds tried to storm the nearby Channel Tunnel, but refugees trying to reach Britain have been arriving in the area for decades.

Residents of the Jungle lack regular access to food, running water and medical care, but there are many volunteers who are trying to make life there more bearable. Jones, who is originally from Wales and now lives in the French town of Amiens, has been bringing supplies into the camp for years. 

“It’s been fascinating to see what people are asking for -- short stories and poetry, for example,” Jones told Publishing Perspectives.

Residents have also set up a church, mosque, school and many small businesses inside the camp.

Jones is appealing for book donations, particularly “Pashto-French dictionaries, Pashto-English dictionaries, Eritrean dictionaries, books in native languages,” she said.

To support Jungle Books, contact maryjones@orange.fr.

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Some new Duke University students are very unhappy with a summer reading option that has gay themes. 

Incoming freshmen began posting on the Class of 2019 Facebook page, saying they had decided against reading Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by New York Times best-selling author Alison Bechdel, according to the Duke Chronicle. The graphic novel, which focuses on Bechdel's sexual identity as a lesbian and her relationship with her closeted father, includes illustrations depicting sex. 

Student Brian Grasso aired his grievances over the memoir's "graphic visual depictions of sexuality" and said reading it "may compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs." He suggested the selection of the book for the Duke Common Experience Summer Reading was insensitive to those with conservative beliefs. 

Others also complained about the "pornographic nature" of the illustrations.

But Duke defended the decision. 

"Duke has had a summer reading for many years to give incoming students a shared intellectual experience with other members of the class," Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, said in a statement to CNN. "'Fun Home' was ultimately chosen because it is a unique and moving book that transcends genres and explores issues that students are likely to confront." 

Fun Home was published in 2006. A musical based on the graphic novel took home five awards, including Best Musical, at the Tony Awards in June. 

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Pop artist Saint Hoax has the answer to a question you didn't know you had: What would 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump look like in drag? 

The answer: Pretty fantastic.

Five celebrities get drag makeovers in Saint Hoax's newest Instagram series, called "Fame Drags You Out." It's a follow-up to his earlier series, "War Drags You Out," which focused on transforming political figures into drag queens. The artist included the presidential hopeful in his roundup because he sees him more as a "fame-hungry celebrity rather than a leader," he told The Huffington Post in an email.

Saint Hoax is also quick to point out that his treatment of these famous men isn't meant as an insult, rather "a visual commentary on virility and masculinity." Earlier this year, the pseudonymous Middle Eastern artist began taking note of Kanye West's media persona --"in every one of his pictures he put on an irritated [or] uninterested face," he told HuffPost -- and saw similar qualities reflected in other male celebrities.

"Even when they do break a smile (like Bieber and Franco), it’s more of a smirk," the artist said. "Their intimidating facial expressions are a way of showing their unbreakable masculinity." The five celebs he chose help "set the standards" for cisgender expression, he explained.

"I always like to produce gender-bending art because it makes people look at things differently," he added. 

Indeed, some would argue that disrupting gender norms is the express purpose of drag. As Karl Westerberg, a contender on Season 3 of LogoTV's "Ru Paul's Drag Race" told ThinkProgress, drag is an "over-the-top parody" of gender. Another former contender, Benjamin Putnam, explained how the display of glam femininity forces us to question the traits that men (and women) are taught to embody, so we might be "kinder and treat each other better."

"People always comment on female representation in the media, and tend to ignore how this also affects men," Saint Hoax told HuffPost.  

Through his unflinching imagery -- which almost exclusively combines pop culture icons with political satire -- Saint Hoax hopes to chip away at gender norms and other "ugly truths."

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Helen Mirren, eat your heart out. There's a new crop of calendar girls on the scene and they've still got it goin' on, even as they're pushing 80. 

The 13 daring Scottish ladies, who are either wives of ex-service men or former service women themselves, stripped down to nothing to support a veteran's hospital in conjunction with Legion Scotland. They're part of the Royal British Legion Seniors Club and are all between the ages of 70 and 80.

"It is all for a great cause," January calendar girl Mary McGregor, 79, told The Daily Record. "I was a private and worked as a cook ... I loved my military days and wouldn't trade my memories for a million pounds. The whole calendar shoot idea was originally a joke but it is a great way to raise cash."

The calendars are selling for £5 each -- or about $7.85 -- and the ladies are hoping to reach a goal of £10,000 -- or about $15,700. The ladies all volunteered for the shoot and their makeup and photography services -- as well as the props used on set -- were all provided at no cost. 

"The photo shoot was hysterical," McGregor said. "We do something for charity each year and this year we have certainly gone for something different. It's a cause that's really close to our hearts."

What a great way to support the troops. 

Check out the bold and beautiful ladies below for yourself. 

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James Lecesne will forgive you if you think his one-man Off-Broadway show, “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey,” is based on a true story. 

The actor-author-playwright says it’s the most common question he’s asked by audiences who’ve seen the show, which is currently playing at New York’s Westside Theatre. But it’s also indicative of the cultural timeliness of Lecesne’s words. The central character, Leonard Pelkey, is a 14-year-old described in the play as being “known for his joyous spirit and a flamboyant sense of style” and has immediate parallels to Matthew Shepard and Tyler Clementi, among other victims of anti-gay bullying.

Best known as the co-founder of The Trevor Project, Lecesne, 60, has a lengthy stage resumé that includes a stint in the 2012 Broadway revival of Gore Vidal's “The Best Man,” starring James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury. In “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey,” Lecesne nails the seemingly daunting task of inhabiting nine individual residents of a south New Jersey town, including a police detective, an awkward teen girl and a wisecracking elderly woman, over the course of 70 minutes while never leaving the stage. Leonard himself never speaks or appears in the show, which requires the audience to form their own take on his persona based on the impact he has made on his hometown, as described by each character.     

Lecense, who based the show on his 2008 novel Absolute Brightness, brings humanity and surprising nuance to each of his characterizations.

“Inhabiting those lives myself… I just felt it would resonate in a more distinct way, as if a piece of each one of those characters is in the audience,” he told The Huffington Post in an interview. “All of the different viewpoints and experiences lie in each one of us.”

He’s got some experience in both the form and the subject: his one-man show, “Word of Mouth,” was adapted into 1994's “Trevor,” an Oscar-winning short film about a gay 13-year-old who commits suicide. The success of "Trevor" led Lecense and producers Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone to establish The Trevor Project, the LGBT suicide prevention organization which has been supported by the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper and Kim Kardashian, among others.  

Since it was founded in 1998, The Trevor Project has aimed to create a safe space for LGBT teens and young adults when they are facing personal challenges. In some respects, Lecesne would like “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey” to accomplish theatrically what The Trevor Project achieves on a national scale, and says he hopes the show will create conversation around the obstacles many young people face as they are coming into their own identity.   

While Absolute Brightness was geared toward young adult readers, Lecesne wanted to adapt its anti-bullying message for a more mature audience when he developed it for the stage. He re-structured the narrative to focus on Chuck DeSantis, a middle-aged detective, rather than 16-year-old Phoebe, as in the book. The peer isolation that Leonard experiences before his death is primarily described by adults onstage rather than fellow teens, stressing the universality of bullying as an issue. However, the show isn’t all gloom-and-doom and features some comedic, laugh-out-loud moments that keep it from becoming maudlin.

Although the LGBT community has made great strides toward equality over the past several years, Lecesne said he wants “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey” to resound beyond the confines of what he describes as “the liberal, progressive community” who believes “we’ve moved on” by now.

“I wanted to get a group of adults in a room and get them to think about not only what they can do for young people, but what they can do for themselves,” he said, noting that he'd welcome the chance to adapt the show for the screen and to have it licensed by school and community theater troupes. “In [many] communities, kids are really in a quandary. They see the world changing, but for them, it's not changing, and that divide is so gigantic.”

James Lecesne stars in “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey” at New York's Westside Theatre through Nov. 1. Head here for more details.  

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